More likely it was the result of rationing. Long waiting lists are one manifestation of rationing. Another is being told to go home and die because your prospects are too poor to justify the expenditure of precious, precious government money.
In other words: socialized medicine.
Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists.More likely it was the result of rationing. Long waiting lists are one manifestation of rationing. Another is being told to go home and die because your prospects are too poor to justify the expenditure of precious, precious government money.
Socialized medicine is, as you note, sold as economical medicine and delivered as cheap medicine. Socialized medicine advocates always talk about "quality health care," but - as Tom Peters long ago pointed out - "If you are not trying to improve, you are not staying where you are - you are getting worse." So the institution of socialized medicine is the death knell not merely for the increase in medical quality but even for medical quality at the present level.And what does it mean even to stop the progress of medical quality? When my mother was the age my daughter is now, she had a kidney removed. The incision scar ran almost halfway around her body, and the recovery from the incision was difficult and painful. Today the removal of a kidney would be a laproscopic procedure doing, in comparison, almost no collateral damage to the abdomen. Indeed, such a patient might be out the door of the hospital in a day.
When my daughter's granddaughter is the age my daughter is now, will she look back to the early 2000's and pity the people who had to be content with the quality of medical care now available to us? Or will she have "Quality health care," and envy us for our superior health care? Heaven forfend such a betrayal of the promise to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."